Phi Clothing Designs is a Second Life based company that sells mesh, flexi clothing with colourful and unique designs. We are online via this website, in Second Life itself with our own store, and we're on the marketplace.secondlife.com too. Come visit our NEW store in Second Life

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Custom Colouring – In Firestorm

This guide will describe how to change the colour of your dress using the Firestorm viewer. It was described using version 4.2.2; so if you receive these instructions and are using in a different version they should be close to what you will be using. If you are already a builder in SL, you won’t need these instructions.

Phi had considered and actually successfully built a HUD to colour our dresses and it worked well. But we soon realized that the HUD would not give the fine controls the way the default editor provides, and after much tweaking decided to abandon the HUD and focus on a notecard that described how to do it in the two main viewers Firestorm and Linden Labs Viewer.

About each Design

Phi defines a design as a combination of three things:

(1) Style
(2) Pattern
(3) Hue

The STYLE is the layout and structure of the mesh. The PATTERN is a general arrangement of that has been placed on the mesh. The HUE is a colour variation of the original pattern.

This guide allows you to add a fourth element, COLOR. All non-Demo Phi Dresses come in Modify/Copy/No Transfer without a colour defined, it is always white, and this guide describes how you can use a Second Life viewer, in this case Firestorm, to change the white color to something else to give you a potentially different looking outfit or to tweak the colours slightly to match your existing accessories.

Step 0 - Don't Over Do It!

I put this step in to remind people to not over due it in the colour bar. The colour changes you might make should be really subtle, otherwise you will end up with something that looks yucky!

Step 1 – Open Your Inventory

Step 2 – Select the Worn Tab

Step 3 – Open the folder next to your Phi outfit

Step 4 – This reveals the worn contents

Step 5 – Right-click the Mesh, and select Edit

Step 6 – Click the Texture Tab

Step 7 – Click the Colour Box

Step 8 - Play

This window gives you presets, a colour grid affecting hue and brightness, specific brightness controls and you can even be geeky by selecting specific Red, Green, Blue, Hue, Saturation, Luminosity, LSL, or Hex values. OMG.

The thing about the colour window is the colour you select will alter the existing colours. Like adding them together, for example, PINK + YELLOW produces a RED result. I could explain why, but the best thing to do is just try. You’ll find that the best colour combinations are only slight colour changes from white, rather than significant colour changes.